Monday, November 16, 2015

Although Gorilla Mindset was the most successful non-fiction independent book launch of 2015, I always look for ways to move the needle. Those who have read my books know the drill:

Be grateful for what you have while focusing your vision of higher peaks.

Keep moving forward.

Appreciate who you are today.

Visualize who you can become tomorrow.

The only way to become better than you are is to work with the best.

Vox Day is a man I admired long before he knew of me. I was linking to his insightful, if controversial, blog as far back as 2009. And while he and I do not agree on everything, that is what free men say of one another. Clones are for cults.

Vox himself had a highly successful non-fiction book launch this year. SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police debuted at #1 in Political Philosophy and stayed there for 12 straight weeks, making it the successful political philosophy book launch of 2015. It may have even been more successful than Gorilla Mindset, but who cares? When you join a championship team, the rest is just details.

He followed up that success with a book he edited, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook, going straight to #1 in the Strategy category. Castalia House currently publishes five of the top 40 books in a category usually dominated by classic names like Clausewitz, Musasshi, and Sun freaking Tzu!

I've been wanting to point out for a while that the "Gorilla Mindset" was not only mainstream, it was literally fundamental to the Edgar Rice Burroughs's classic Tarzan novels which flat out caused a sensation among readers in America. A great many adventure stories of today are fairly well tame in comparison and are part and parcel to the same narrative the springs from journalists, academics, and even the pulpit.

And while he and I do not agree on everything, that is what free men say of one another.

Civilization is built on this. It is so tiresome to hear the RINO screeds and hand-wringing whenever someone's political course varies a half-degree from the true line. Libertarians are famous for self immolation - their penchant for finding enemy agents within and purging impure blood is staggering - and the result is nothing meaningful will ever be accomplished by Libertarians.

It's refreshing to see people who may be 90% aligned get together to do big things. I know I know, it's like church growth - better 10 new people who are active and on-fire believers in Christ than 1000 pew-sitting coffee drinkers. But at the same time, that strategy has put together a long, unbroken chain of avoidable defeats. I appreciate people like Cernovich and Torgerson who see the bigger picture, even if I don't agree with them entirely on the Nicene Creed or the benefits of organized labor. I'm excited!

Well, this is going to be good. Just do not recruit any SF authors I like, Jerry Pournelle included. Because VD needs to write more, and Ringo and his merry bunch of mercenaries (run by Baen) need to write more.

Seconded. There's tons of military science fiction but relatively little good mil sci-fi.

Kratman is one of the best.

While Carrera's on hiatus, one of my favourite military sci-fi writers at the moment is B.V. Larsen. He has a couple of dozen novels free on Kindle Unlimited - the STAR FORCE and UNDYING MERCENARIES series. They're not deep books, and they're not clever books. But they're fun books, packed full of nonstop action with violent space battles and evil aliens getting splattered to bits. And what more do you want?

Relatively few fantasy books catch my attention. But anything by John C. Wright is on my shut-up-and-take-my-money list.

His awesome fantasy adventure SOMEWHITHER is the best damn novel of 2015, IMO.

In case anyone's living under a rock and missed them somehow, I recommend Mike Shepherd's Kris Longknife books. They're kind of like Weber's Honor Harrington series, except the political digressions are a tenth the length and the main character somehow manages to be less of a Mary Sue despite being a bona fide space princess. (I love the Honor books, but her character arc is kind of ridiculous and damn but the middle books were preachy. Also, the side series are getting out of hand--the 1632-verse is already too big to keep up with, I don't need another forty-novel world.)

On the reading front, just finished Chris Kennedy's Beyond the Shroud of the Universe which was pretty good, then stumbled into a gem of new book, TFS Ingenuity, by Tori Harris. He came up with a neat take on war-by-proxy with Earth as the pawn. Also started re-reading the Stars Came Back. Damn if I don't mind the screenplay format at all.